VituVingiSana wrote:Kenya needs to work of FISCAL DISCIPLINE - easier said than done given short-term populism pays very well for politicians - and not QE.
Imposing fiscal discipline will bring short-term pain but the long-term benefits will out-weigh the pain BUT this is unlikely to happen unless we have an enlightened leadership and voters.
Spot on VituVingiSana.Our corrupt politicians,if given the chance,would love to have zero and even negative interest rates,run money printing QE and Debt Monetization to pump up the stock,bond and real estate market,flood the country with cheap loans so that the populace can borrow easily (and buy assets to build unsustainable bubbles that burst like the housing bubble burst of 2008 GFC) and the grateful electorate would vote these politicians back.All this would be at the expense of a rapidly depreciating currency and a debt load that would lead to tears later.Its good that our currency is psychologically weak in the global markets such that any excess monetary expansion would result in massive devaluation of the currency and this prevents CBK from just printing money recklessly.This forced monetary discipline will be beneficial later.
As I said earlier,fundamentally,the major currencies ie USD,Euro,Yen,Pound,Yuan and Swiss Franc are bogus considering the way these currencies are being printed in their trillions.But fundamentals dont matter much nowadays in the developed world.So long as people believe in the value of these currencies since these nations are the most technologically developed,they will command psychological value even though they have little intrinsic value.Eventually these fiat currencies will fail as all fiat currencies in history always revert to zero.There is little difference between what the advanced nations are doing with their currencies vs what Zimbabwe and Venezuela did but it takes longer for developed nations to massively inflate their currencies though inevitably they will.
Fundamentals also dont matter in Western stock markets.Bad economic news is perceived as good for equities as market participants know that the Fed will print more money to offset the bad news.This happened last Thursday (as it has happened many times before),where US printed jobless claims of 6.6 million which was an appalling number that fundamentally should have resulted in a decline in the stock market but the market rallied once the Fed came out and announced yet another 2.3 trillion USD bailout package which meant more easy money for Wall Street to buy stocks
Contrarian Investor and Trader.Advocate of free markets,limited government interference in the economy and sound money